On Thu, 12 May 2005, Richard gelling wrote:
> fileToSearchFor = raw_input( "Type in the file name you want to search > for: ") > > if fileToSearchFor in fileList: > print "%s was found" % fileToSearchFor > else: > print "%s was not found" % fileToSearchFor > > Could someone explain to me why this pice of code doesn't work, in that > it works fine up until where I have commented , but when I come to > search the list for a file name, even though I know the filename is in > that particular directory, and is present in the list returned by > 'fileList.append( files )' it always reports that the file is not found. Hi Richard, Ah. TypeError. *grin* At least, a conceptual one. The code above accumulates the fileList with the following: fileList.append( files ) But the problem is that your fileList is a list of lists of file names. What you really want to do is: fileList.extend( files ) to hold a flat list of file names in fileList. The extend() method of a list allows the list to absorb the elements of the other input list. Concretely, your fileList probably looks something like this: [['hello.txt'], ['notes.txt', 'blah.txt']] where you really want to have something like this instead: ['hello.txt', 'notes.txt', 'blah.txt'] Hope this helps! _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor